Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 Part 34

The Duca was simply out--not dead. Since Kirby did not want him dead, he did not strike again, but swung back from the sprawled body, faced Naida, and pointed to the tower door.

"Up there!" he snapped. "Seize the tower. I have a reason!"

At the Duca's cras.h.i.+ng downfall, had come to the caciques a tension which made Kirby know they would not be dummy figures much longer. His eyes never left them.

"Quick, Naida!" he snapped again. "We must hold the tower!"

Naida, all of the girls, were staring dazedly at Elana, dead.

"The tower!" she choked. "But we cannot go there. It is the Duca's!"

"Because it is the Duca's," Kirby said firmly, "is exactly why we must hold it. Come, Naida, please--"

And then he saw comprehension begin to dawn at last.

He also saw two of the caciques glide from the wooden line, and slink toward him past the unconscious Duca, stealthily.

As Naida suddenly cried out to her companions, pushed at two of them, and then darted like a rainbow nymph toward the silent and forbidding upward spiral of steps, Kirby faced the gliding caciques.

One he clutched with viselike hands, and lifted him. As the other shrieked and sprang, he was mowed down by the hurtling body of his fellow priest which Kirby flung forward mightily.

The rest of the caciques were howling. While Naida waited beside the tower door, the other girls flashed up the steps. The Duca still lay where he had fallen, a thread of blood oozing from his mouth. Kirby, after his last look over all, solemnly stooped and gathered in his arms the limp, radiant little body of the girl who had given her life that her friends might be left with a leader.

A moment later, he was standing on the steps. Naida, unopposed by the still stupefied caciques, swung shut the tower door and shot a double bolt.

"Naida--" Kirby whispered as he held Elana closer to him, "oh, I am so sorry that we could have won only at such a price."

As Naida stooped to kiss the pale little forehead with its halo of golden hair, sobs came. But then she raised her eyes, and they were, for Kirby, alight with the message that she could and would accept Elana's sacrifice, because she would gladly have made it herself.

"We will not forget," she whispered. "Carry her tenderly, and come."

For better, for worse, the Duca's tower was theirs.

CHAPTER VI

At the end of an hour, Kirby was taking a turn of guard duty at the foot of the steps, while the others remained with Elana in a chamber above.

To Kirby, with things thus far along, it seemed that the seizure of the tower had proved a shrewd stroke.

It seemed that the tower was to the Duca what hair was to Sampson. From Naida had come the information that the Duca lived hidden within the great shaft of obsidion, and appeared but seldom even before his caciques. Apparently a large part of his hold upon his subjects was maintained by the mystery with which he kept himself surrounded. And now his retreat was lost to him! Such had been the moral effect of the loss upon both Duca and caciques, that his whole first hour had gone by without their doing anything.

Kirby, standing just around the first turn of the winding stairway, presently c.o.c.ked his ears to listen to the conclave being held in the amphitheatre.

"Why not starve them out, O Holy One?" he heard one of the caciques ask of the Duca, only to be answered by a growl of negation.

The Duca, Kirby had gathered before this, wanted to fight.

"But there is no food in the tower, is there?" the cacique still pressed on, and this time he was supported by other voices.

"No," the Duca rumbled back. "But am I to be deprived of my retreat, left here like a common dog amongst other dogs, while these accursed fiends starve slowly to death? No! I tell you, you must fight for me!"

But he had told them so several times before and nothing had happened.

Kirby grinned at the thought of the caste the Duca was losing by being driven to this belittling parley.

"Holy One," exclaimed a new priest in answer to the urge to fight, "what can we do against the golden haired fiend? The stairs are so narrow that he could defend them alone. And then there are the gates of bronze. If we could shatter the first, at the foot of the steps, we should only encounter others. The Duca must remember that his tower was built to withstand attack."

"Even so," the Duca snapped back, "it must be attacked! I--"

But then he fell silent, having been made so by the sounds of dissension which arose amongst his caciques. Kirby, laughing to himself, turned away from his listening post, and tip-toed up the steps.

After he had closed and bolted behind him three of the bronze portals so feared by the caciques, he turned to the entrance of the chamber in which he had left Naida and the others. Here all was silent, and he found his friends grouped about a couch on which lay Elana. Feeling the solemnity of the moment, he would have taken his place quietly amongst the mourners.

Naida, however, came to him at once, and in a low voice asked for news from the amphitheatre, and when Kirby answered that the caciques were unanimously in favor of leaving them alone until they starved, she exclaimed:

"Oh, then it is good news!"

After that, however, a shadow of doubt flickered in her great eyes.

"And yet, is it? It means temporary immunity, of coa.r.s.e.

But--starvation!"

Kirby a.s.sured her with a grin.

"If we had to starve we might worry. But there is more food here than the Duca thinks. Look!"

From a bulging pocket of his tunic he fished a strip of the roots on which he had subsisted so comfortably. Naida's eyes widened, and several of the girls gave low cries.

"Yes," Naida exclaimed, "but such food! Why--why, do you know what you are offering us? Why, this is the sacred Peyote! Only the Duca eats it, and, at rare intervals, his priests."

Kirby was really startled now.

"But surely you and the others have taken quant.i.ties of the stuff away from the Valley of the Geyser. Do you mean--"

"Because we gathered the Peyote does not mean that we have ever tasted it. We gather it for the Duca. To taste would be complete, utter sacrilege. Have _you_ been eating it?"

Inwardly Kirby was chuckling at this added proof of the bunc.u.mbe with which the Duca--and other Ducas--had fooled all.

"Of course I've been eating the Peyote."

"And--and nothing has happened to you?" Naida asked.

"Hardly. I certainly haven't been blasted by the Lords of the Sun and Moon, or the Serpent either!"